The Albany Medical Center Prize serves to encourage and recognize extraordinary and sustained contributions to improving health care and promoting innovative biomedical research.

Awarded annually, the $500,000 prize is the largest prize in medicine in the United States and is bestowed to any physician or scientist, or group, whose work has led to significant advances in the fields of health care and scientific research with demonstrated translational benefits applied to improved patient care.

The prize is a legacy to its founder - the late Morris "Marty" Silverman.  At the inaugural awards ceremony in Albany, NY in March 2001, Albany Medical Center Prize founder Marty Silverman started a tradition that will be carried on for the duration of the Prize - 100 years. Marty's promise was to light one candle each year to honor that year's recipient.

All three of this year’s recipients transformed the field of immunology with groundbreaking discoveries that led to a better understanding of how the human immune system senses and responds to infectious agents. Their subsequent scientific research has led to new therapies for people with infections, autoimmune disorders, and other immune system-related diseases.

Dr. Beutler, Professor and Chairman of the department of genetics at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA, is famous for discovering several immune system proteins involved in sensing bacteria and viruses, and his subsequent development of therapies for patients. Dr. Beutler was born in Chicago in 1957, and grew up in Southern California. He graduated from the University of California, San Diego in 1976, and received his M.D. from the University of Chicago in 1981. He performed an internship and residency at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University. Dr. Beutler was a professor and researcher at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center before joining the faculty at Scripps in 2000.

Dr. Dinarello, Professor of Medicine at the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine, is considered a founding father of cytokine biology, and his studies have focused on the immune system’s inflammatory reactions. He was born in 1943 in Boston. He received his medical degree from Yale University and performed a residency at Massachusetts General Hospital. In the 1970s, he was a clinical associate and senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. He was a professor of medicine and pediatrics at Tufts University School of Medicine and staff physician at New England Medical Center Hospital in Boston. He joined the faculty at the University of Colorado in 1996.

Dr. Steinman, the Henry G. Kunkel Professor in Rockefeller University’s Laboratory of Cellular Physiology and Immunohematology in New York City, is world-renowned for his discovery and subsequent studies of the dendritic cell, the immune system’s central regulator. Born in Montreal in 1943, he graduated from McGill University in 1963, and earned his medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1968. Following an internship and residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, he joined Rockefeller University in 1970 as a postdoctoral fellow. He was appointed an assistant professor in 1972, associate professor in 1976, and professor in 1988. He was named Henry G. Kunkel Professor in 1995 and director of the Christopher H. Browne Center for Immunology and Immune Diseases in 1998.

They have been honored with numerous previous awards and honors. Among their many, Dr. Steinman holds the prestigious Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, Dr. Dinarello was honored with the Ernst Jung Prize in Medicine (Germany), and Dr. Beutler received the William B. Coley Award from the Cancer Research Institute.

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